DAD AT WORK AT CEREBOS (LATE 40s/EARLY 50s)

by Dave Roberts


This photo first appeared on Facebook, not as part of the regular 'Middlewich' series, but on Father's Day 2011 as a tribute to my Dad, Arthur Roberts, who was a foreman electrician at Cerebos Salt Ltd (later to become part of RHM Foods) from the late 30s until his retirement through ill health around 1969. Dad is pictured here in the generator room at Cerebos in (we think) the late 40s/early 50s. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the generator plant and its controls and, when he had to retire, was retained as a consultant and driven up to the works at weekends by Percy Wrench in the works van to check that everything was OK. The Cerebos generating plant was very efficient for its day, as the steam used to run the generators was not released into the atmosphere but recycled to provide heating and hot water for the whole factory, as well as for a very unusual salt pan which can best be described as a giant 'electric kettle'. The steam heated a giant element in the pan which, unlike the coal fired pans at Seddons and Murgatroyds, could be kept going for days and weeks on end, making it far more productive than most salt pans. A lot of the power produced, went to run the vacuum salt plant, fore-runner of the one now in use at British Salt which produces the over half  of the country's salt requirements.

Salt plants and electrical generators are, of course, run with the help of computers these days, but in Dad's day, all the knowledge was, literally, in his head. He taught himself electrical engineering in his spare time by correspondence course.




see also QUEEN MUM


First published on Facebook, Father's Day, July 11th 2011

Republished June 15th (Fathers Day) 2014

Republished June 19th (Fathers Day) 2016

Republished June 18th (Fathers Day) 2017

Also June 17th (Father's Day) 2018

June 16th (Father's Day) 2019

June 21st (Father's Day) 2020

June 20th (Father's Day) 2021

June 19th (Father's Day) 2022

June 18th (Father's Day) 2023

June 16th (Father's Day) 2024

June 14th (Father's Day) 2025

June 21st (Father's Day) 2026

MUDC RATE DEMAND 1971

by Dave Roberts
My mother, fortunately for us, was from a generation which never threw anything away. This is why we're able to bring you another piece of Middlewich ephemera from forty years ago in the form of this Middlewich UDC rate demand for our modest family home in King Street.
The number 33 seems to stand out from the rest of the address, and there's a good reason for this; the ADREMA (See below) plate for our address had been altered because of the re-numbering of houses in King Street a few years earlier.
No. 27 became no. 33 and we received a letter threatening all kinds of retribution if we didn't change the number on the front of the house. In fact I'm not so sure that the death penalty wasn't still in force for failure to change your house number when told to do so.
The interest, to me, lies in the technology used to produce this most unwelcome of bills and its receipt which is a far cry from the slick computerised systems we have today.
Notice that the total payable for the year is £77.08 for a three bedroomed semi (or 'domestic hereditament' if you will). Oddly, this still sounds like a lot of money, considering that we are talking about the early 70s. The other amount, of £3.28 for the half year, was nothing to do with the council but was a charge for water rates collected by the council on behalf of the Mid - Cheshire Water Board.
The receipt is signed by Collecting Officer 'D. Roberts'. This is no coincidence, but proof that I was, at least, in gainful employment forty years ago at the age of 19. The square space on the receipt was where stamps were stuck on and signed over for certain transactions. Stamp duty on these receipts was abolished during my time at the council.
But it's the rate demand itself, and the way it was produced, which brings back memories and is so evocative of long-vanished ways of working in the pre-computer age.
The blank rate demands were produced for us by the clerk's department on a photocopier, a different coloured paper being used for each year to save confusion (and prevent  anyone paying the same bill twice).
Many of the Council's documents, such as minutes, internal memos etc, were produced on stencil machines
(usually made by Gestetner), using a complicated process involving typing on a special sheet (the ribbon selector on an office typewriter had three settings: black, red and stencil (which, in fact, kept the ribbon out of the way and enabled typing direct onto the stencil sheets).
But if I remember rightly these rate demands were too complicated to be run off on Gestetners (although it could be done) so a rather inefficient photocopying machine was used (even allowing for forty years of deterioration, you can tell that the print quality was only just adequate).
Then came the fun part. The addressing of the rate demands was done on our ADREMA machine, made by a German company (ADdREssenMAchine, or something of the kind) and which had been pioneered during the war by the Germans for the registration of prisoners of war.
Basically the system was that every rateable property in the town had its own ADREMA plate - an aluminium plate with the name and address pressed onto it, forming a collection of printing plates which were then stacked up on a machine with a massive operating handle which you brought down with a huge crash to print the rate demands. Obviously, when ownership of a property changed we had to have the details on the plate altered which involved sending the plate off to the factory to be flattened and re-pressed with the new details. This, of course, could be highly frustrating if people moved into a house and only stayed a short time, necessitating the re-pressing of the relevant plate time and time again.
It must be appreciated, though, that this system could only print the addresses. The actual figures on the demands were hand-written by Rating Officer Bertie Maddock and were actually copies of  entries in the Rating Ledger which was precisely that - a huge book with details of every rateable property in Middlewich hand-written into it. This had to be balanced each year, with the amount received exactly matching the amount due.
This document was one of the first batch of rate demands the MUDC issued in decimal currency. The new system had been introduced in February and all the council staff underwent training at Crewe College over a period of six weeks so that we would be conversant with pounds and pence (or pee as people still annoyingly insist on calling them) when they replaced pounds, shillings and pence. We were even given 'homework'.

The idea was that we would be able to help the elderly who, it was thought, would end up hopelessly confused. In the event no one, however elderly, had any problems at all.
Incidentally, on 'D-Day' (the 15th February 1971) rating officer Bertie Maddock told me that he would serve our first 'decimal customer' but, in the event, he was out of the office when the historic moment came, and the honour fell to me.
Middlewich UDC's method of issuing rate demands was a clumsy and unwieldy system, made instantly redundant just a few years later by computerisation, but twice a year our little rates office more closely resembled a small factory and echoed to the bang and crash of the ADREMA machine. I'm wondering if my current problems with my right arm can be traced back to this time, and if it's too late to sue the council...
We'll be hearing more about life in the council offices in due course.

Facebook feedback:

Geraldine Williams I remember those scary Rate Demands - and running the gauntlet of Bertie Maddock's glare if you were a day or two late in paying. He seemed to mellow after he married Freda! We had a Gestetner in school and spent many an hour cranking the handle on the side and thought we were quite advanced, but oh the joy of using the electric model in the Presbytery 

Dave Roberts Well - I suppose I can say this now - you should have tried working with him...

Jonathan Williams The Town Council were still using a Gestetner machine when I started in 1985. Took me days to complete a set of minutes. Covered head to toe with black ink and correcting fluid I was!!

Dave Roberts  I know. I had one in my garage when I was at Mottram Close,passed on by Frank Smith of the Heritage Society - the idea was that the Society's Newsletter would be produced on the thing. Not a hope. The machine and all its ancillary equipment took up all the space where the family car should have been and was always subject to the law of diminishing returns - hours and hours producing one page on a stencil; seconds for it to be destroyed by a malicious and malevolent Gestetner machine.
 ‎...and don't get me started on the convoluted workings of the Kalamazoo wages system. I can only recall doing the dustbinbmen's wages once (I don't think they'd let me do it a second time) and the nightmare haunts me still. Got away with it, though...

First published 12th August 2011
Re-formatted and re-published 30th May 2020

Corrected and re-published 15th February 2021 (the 50th anniversary of 'Decimal Day')

BANK HOLIDAY (FILM) 1937

The Roberts Collection


BANK HOLIDAY (VIMEO LINK)

Film © Salt Town Productions 2017

By Dave Roberts

Bank Holiday was produced by the Mid-Cheshire Amateur Cinematography Society circa 1937.
The film shows the adventures of a group of friends venturing out from Wheelock (that fine old house at the top of the bank is still there, and looks very much the same today)

and into the Cheshire countryside around the River Dane near Middlewich, the Beeston Castle and Tarporley area, Bostock and the Shropshire Union Canal.

Highlights are:

Precious seconds of footage showing Middlewich station in its heyday. To get to Beeston Castle & Tarporley station, our travellers would have had to change at Crewe. They're on the wrong platform for the Crewe train...

Scenes featuring the long-vanished Beeston Castle & Tarporley station on the Crewe-Chester line.

Glimpses of the Nag's Head Hotel in Wheelock. 

An old black and white milestone on the Middlewich-Northwich Road at Bostock, which is still in exactly the same position today and, despite the depredations of  modern-day road traffic, looks just the same as it did eight decades ago.

And much more.

Watch out, towards the end of the film, for the scene in which several of our tired and weary Bank Holiday revellers are picked up by a horse and cart in a leafy Cheshire lane. This scene wasn't planned in any way; the cart just happened along as filming was taking place, and the driver was happy to be a part of the proceedings.

...and what better destination could you have than the one so stylishly depicted in this long-vanished signpost?

I've loved this film ever since I first saw it when I was a small child. It features many of my relations and their friends. Uncle Bill (Oakes), once of Three Willows in Mill Lane Middlewich, is the man who (heroically, we always thought) falls into the River Dane in an attempt to retrieve his cap. Uncle Bill also wrote the script (or 'scenario' to use the term current at the time).

Auntie Winnie and Auntie Evelyn are also very much in evidence, Auntie Winnie (Uncle Bill's wife) as one of the hikers, complete with rucksack, and Auntie Evelyn  wielding a camping kettle and primus stove four minutes into  the film. Auntie Evelyn, incidentally, was married to Clifford Ridgway, and older Middlewich residents may remember her as the proprietor of Ridgways Newsagents in Wheelock Street, more recently known as Chisholm's.

But the undoubted star of the show is my Dad, Arthur, playing the unlikely role of an angler whose love of angling is only surpassed by his love of bottles of beer. 

In real life Dad hardly ever touched a drop, but that's real acting for you.

In case you're wondering which of the two bicycling fishermen is Dad, he's the one in the lighter coloured hat.

If you recall all those old-fashioned Western films, you'll remember that the 'goodies' always had lighter coloured hats than the 'baddies'. Not that the other fellow was a 'baddie', of course, but it does make identification a bit easier...


There's a lovely shot in the film showing one of Dad's prized possessions, a Victorian gold pocket-watch which was passed on to him by his father.

That same watch is now one of my prized possessions, too, and still keeps perfect time.

A word about the music: Over the years this film has been shown with various tacked-on musical accompaniments, but I've always known the exact song which  would make the perfect companion to these 1930s Cheshire frolics: Albert Whelan's immortal I'm Happy When I'm Hiking - and I'm pleased to be able to marry film and song together for the first time here. 

Albert's classic song is augmented by other appropriate music from  Jack Hylton, the Andrews Sisters, the New Concert Orchestra and Jack Leon & His Band. Making a virtue out of a necessity, we've spliced together Albert's version of this quintessential hiking song with Jack Leon's version at the start of the film. Can you tell where the joins are? Albert Whelan's unedited version, in its entirety, is played over the closing sequences and titles. It took a lot of fiddling about to do all this, but that fiddling can best be described as a 'labour of love'!

You'll note that one of the pieces used is It's That Man Again, the theme tune to Tommy Handley's wildly popular radio show of the same name,  usually abbreviated to ITMA.
This is included for a very special reason:
As noted (below) the films in the Roberts Collection ended up in the North-West Film Archive at Manchester University.
In the early 1990s Granada TV, then at its original home in Quay Street, Manchester, was still in the business of making 'regional' programmes for transmission only in 'Granadaland', aka the North West. 
One of the company's programmes for 'local' consumption was a nostalgic documentary series called The Way We Were, narrated by Stuart Hall, which contrasted life in the North West in the 1930s, 40s and 50s with life in the early 90s.
The team at Granada would often call me to ask for copyright clearance on little bits of the films in the  Roberts Collection for inclusion in this nostalgic series, thus making Dad and Uncle Bill and other members of MCACS latter day TV stars, 60 years or so after they made their films.
The production team at Granada were very fond of using It's That Man Again as background music because, although ITMA is usually thought of as a wartime show, it actually started in the late 1930s and continued after the war until Tommy Handley's death in 1949. The ITMA theme is a 1930s classic, redolent of the rather desperate optimism of those fretful times. Our film features the full studio orchestra version which is included here as an oblique remembrance of Granada TV and all the staff who were sold down the river when the bland and boring national 'itv' usurped the proper regional service which we valued so much and which has been taken away from us.

Although the music still sounds great, sadly the picture quality on this version of the film is awful, bordering on abysmal. This is due to the fact that, owing  to unfortunate circumstances,  I've had to use a copy of a copy of a DVD of a video of the film (if that makes any sense) in order to bring it to you at all.

Like all the rest of the Roberts Collection of films, the original of Bank Holiday resides in the vaults of the North-West Film Archive in Manchester and I hope, in the fullness of time, to be able to show you a much better and much clearer version.

If you've been so kind as to read through this rambling introductory rigmarole rather than going straight to the link to the film, here it is again to save you the trouble of scrolling back to the top of the page.

BANK HOLIDAY (VIMEO LINK)

Film © Salt Town Productions 2017

First published 25th September 2017

Re-published Bank Holiday Monday, 7th May 2018
Bank Holiday Monday, 26th August 2019

MIDDLEWICH RAMBLERS BADGE 1920s

© Salt Town Productions 2012

by Dave Roberts

Back in September 2011 we looked at the original badge of the Middlewich Ramblers Cycling Club which was passed on to my late father by the Revd J.W. Fortnum when the club was revived sometime in the 1920s.

In the original diary entry I mentioned that, somewhere, I had another badge, which must have been the badge of the 'new' Middlewich Ramblers CC from the 1920s.

This, as can be seen, has now come to light, and is reproduced above. The actual badge measures 1" across.

It's a rather more modest and simple affair than the original badge, and its main feature is the wheatsheaf motif in the centre, proudly proclaiming the club's Cheshire origins.

According to Allan Earl the Revd Fortnum came to Middlewich in 1892, so the original Middlewich Ramblers Club will have been founded some time after that, probably during the Victorian era..

The Revd was a keen cyclist and, at the turn of the century, cycled to London in one day - a distance of 173 miles! He was also a keen golfer, footballer, angler and billiard player.

So in the 1920s, when my father and his friends decided to revive The Middlewich Ramblers Cycling Club the Revd Fortnum must have approached them, or been approached by them, and given them the badge of the original club as a keepsake.

Here, for easy comparison, are the two versions of the badge side by side:

First published 28th October 2012

Re-formatted and re-published 2nd June 2018

ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 1973

by Dave Roberts


This is the view from my bedroom window at no. 33 King Street in 1973. The Middlewich Archaeological Society is playing host to other archaeologists as they make a field trip to the dig in the field adjacent to our back fence. Many years later, this would also be the site of the Middlewich 'Community Dig'. The archaeological project of the early 1970s was headed by J D Bestwick of Keele University.

The field in question, alone among the fields bordering King Street, has not yet succumbed to housing development, but repeated attempts have been made to build houses there and there's no doubt that one day someone will succeed, ending forever the wonderful view of the town centre and the church we enjoyed for all those years.

In the background can be seen the site of the Seddons Pepper Street Works across the canal and River Croco. This seemed to remain empty for many years (although the 1975 Inland Waterways Association Rally was held there) until the Moorings was built. If you look carefully, you can see that the Middlewich we know today was slowly taking shape around the new 'Inner Relief Road' (St Michael's Way). Is it my imagination or can I just make out, on the low grey building to the left which is now Tesco Express and Pineland, the words CO-OPERATIVE SUPERSTORE?

Top right is Middlewich telephone exchange, once isolated in its own compound off Pepper Street but by this time just another building on St Michael's Way. The telephone exchange has since been much extended and now finds itself surrounded by the Powell House and Spindle Whorl Developments which link St Michael's Way and Wheelock Street.


A brief history of the various archaeological projects in the area over the years can be found here:


MIDDLEWICH ARCHAEOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT (REVISED)

(pdf file - Cheshire Shared Services)


First published 22nd July 2011


Expanded and re-published 30th May 2018